It—he—looked desiccated, despite the thick humidity of the air. I thought of mummies pulled from Egyptian tombs. His skin had shrunk so tight against the bone that I could see the sunken depression between the bones of his forearms, leading down to the delicate bones of… the wrists, bound with iron manacles…
I swallowed hard.
My first attention had been for the corpse itself, not its surroundings. But now I looked and fear coiled up from my belly and took me by the throat.
The body lay spread-eagled on a wire mesh, heavy and widely spaced, like a fence panel, framed with wood. Iron shackles, dripping with rust, enclosed his wrists and ankles.
Oh god, I thought.Halder, what have you done?
If I had found that he was using human corpses in experiments with insects that ate carrion, I would have been horrified, yes. But the dead were dead and long past harming, and, God help me, I would have understoodwhyhe did it.
But the dead don’t need to be chained down.
I wanted to turn away. No, Iwantedto run screaming. My vision swam.
Stop that. You are a naturalist, are you not?
This isn’t natural!I shouted inside my skull.
No. But you are a trained observer. Soobserve, damn you, and quit cringing.
My breathing steadied. I straightened my shoulders.The dead are dead. Now the living have to take notes.
The corpse had been male, in life, though what remained was shrunken almost to nonexistence, and his face was stained with black around the nose and mouth. His hands had shrunken so far that he could have pulled loose from any ordinary shackle. In life, the fetters must have been cruelly tight. But his fingers… what was wrong with his fingers?
They looked impossibly long and deformed, curling back on themselves. So did his toes. I took another step forward, saw the sharp edges, and realized that I was looking at fingernails that had grown and grown and grown and never been trimmed.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph. How long was this poor soul here?
The wire platform was about waist high, but there was a solid wooden shelf a few feet under it. A wide metal trough covered half of it, perhaps to catch the prisoner’s waste. I saw flashes of white in the candlelight and leaned down.
Chicken feathers.
I had no time to dwell on what that might mean, becausein bending down, I saw what lay on the underside of the wire mesh.
My first wild thought was that someone had poured wax over the body and that it had dripped downward, forming swollen droplets that hung from the underside of the corpse in pale swags. Then I saw the dark ovals on each swelling, the blunt black ends of larvae burrowed beneath the surface, and I knew.
I did not scream. I did not even flinch. I simply stared.
The botfly larvae had grown atop one another in places, dozens of fat warbles hanging together like bunches of sickly grapes. Under the corpse’s hips and lower back, they were so thickly clustered that they formed a mass as large as a man’s head. All the flesh that was missing from the bones hung below the mesh, filled with squirming, parasitic life.
I might have stood there, frozen, until dawn, if not for the candle. Hot wax burned a trail down my hand and I yelped and dropped it.
The flame hit the water and went out.
Panic leapt up and grabbed me by the throat. The blackness that engulfed me was a hundred times deeper and darker than anything aboveground. I went to my knees in the water, groping across the surface for the candle, because if I couldn’t find it, I was going to be blundering through the dark, looking for the exit, and what if Ididn’tfind it, what if I got turned around and went toward the body instead, what if I reached out and my hand closed over the warbles, the soft flesh stretched tight around the dark body within, what if itmoved…
Stop that!I screamed at myself.Stop that!
My petticoats were soaked with water. It sloshed over the top of my boots. It was freezing cold, much colder than it had any right to be, but I kept sliding my hands across the surface, feeling desperately for the candle, terrified that I was making ripples that would send it floating even farther away.
And then my fingers touched something smooth and cylindrical and I felt it bobbing away and snatched it up. Found the wick. Nearly cried with relief.
I was groping in my pocket for matches when something buzzed against my face.
I batted it away with a shriek. It was big, the size of a bumblebee, and on some level I knew exactly what it was, but if I let that thought come up to the surface, I was going to pass out right here in the black water and then it would come and lay eggs in my skin and…
The match flared up. My hands shook so violently that I had to move two steps and brace myself against the wooden table before I could light the candle. Cold fabric clung to my legs and I realized that I was weeping.
